Dark Oracle

by Alayna Williams

  Magnusson’s daughter might just be the key Tara was searching for.

  HARRY KNEW HE WAS BEING WATCHED.

  From the time he’d left Tara’s room, his skin had crawled. He scanned the darkness of the motel parking lot, unholstering his gun. Pools of the buzzing sulfur lights picked out the shapes of cars: his, the night clerk’s beat-up Datsun, a Winnebago belonging to the retired couple watching game shows loudly downstairs, and a station wagon driven by two harried parents dragging their kids kicking and screaming to the Grand Canyon, as evidenced by the maps and toys littering the seats.

  Concealing the gun behind the empty pizza box he’d intended to take to the Dumpster, he stepped down the metal stairs, wincing at the loud echoes his steps made. Below the perforated metal steps, he glimpsed movement, a figure receding around the corner of the motel. It disappeared beyond the edge of the blacktop parking lot hidden by the side of the Winnebago, and did not emerge.

  An eavesdropper? Surveillance? Harry’s eyes narrowed.

  Harry followed, crossing around the front bumper of the camper. His sneakers made no sound on the asphalt, and he listened. He could hear the pings made by the Winnebago’s engine as it cooled down, the high-pitched whine of the parking lot lights overhead, his heart hammering in his throat.

  He swung out around the edge of the Winnebago, flipping the pizza box under his right arm to reveal and brace the gun.

  “Agent Li.” Richard Corvus stood, hands in his pockets, watching him with amusement. Streetlight outlined him in saffron, reflecting off his glasses. The effect made his eyes entirely unreadable.

  Harry sighed, holstering his gun. “Hello, sir.”

  Corvus sniffed at the pizza box. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

  Harry shrugged. “I can think of many worse ways to go than by way of double cheese and pepperoni.” He cast the box, Frisbee-style, into the nearby Dumpster. It landed with a hollow slap that made Corvus twitch. “What brings you here?”

  “Checking on your progress. I might have asked you the same.” Corvus gave him an arch glance.

  Li responded stoically. “Comparing notes.” He didn’t like Corvus’s insinuation. It seemed both possessive and invasive.

  “What have you found?” Corvus cocked his head. Li was reminded of a bird, a balding crow in his black coat.

  Li swallowed. “We didn’t get much from DOD. Major Gabriel is busily mopping up the crime scene, and we can’t drag out of them what Magnusson is working on. Judging by his research, I’m guessing it has to do with particle physics, but we’ll keep looking.

  “DOD hasn’t released any trace evidence to us. I’ve put in a request for copies through official channels. Magnusson’s office is clean.” Li withheld the information about the photos and the watch. Deep down in his gut, he never trusted Corvus, though he still had to play the game. But Harry would keep some pieces to himself.

  “Any signs of foul play?”

  “None yet, but that’s not ruled out.” Li stubbornly wanted to keep that door open.

  “I suggest that you rule it out as soon as you can,” Corvus said mildly, but his statement chilled Li.

  “We’ll rule out all dead ends as soon as possible.”

  Corvus looked at him sharply over his glasses. “You didn’t come to see me when you were finished today.”

  “Dr. Sheridan’s suit containment was compromised. We were busy taking care of that. I intended to call.” Li forced himself to shut his mouth before he dug himself in any deeper.

  “Dr. Sheridan has the habit of attracting catastrophe.”

  Li couldn’t help himself. “Then why did you ask her to consult on this case?”

  Corvus’s mouth tightened. “That was not my call,” he snapped.

  Someone from above had told him to investigate, and who to use. “But you’ve worked with her before.”

  “Yes. We were assigned together in Special Projects years ago.” Corvus took off his glasses and wiped them meticulously on his sleeve. “An unfortunate incident derailed her career, which had seemed quite promising. If not for that incident, you would likely be reporting to her now. She was, by all assessment, a brilliant profiler.”

  “What happened?”

  Corvus smiled. Li could see he had the irritating habit of keeping tantalizing nuggets of information, parsing them out only when necessary. “You’ve read about the serial killer who called himself the Gardener?”

  “That was the guy, five years ago, who was cutting girls up and burying them alive in Missouri. Amos Dalton. He planted flowers over the sites where he buried them.” Li dredged his memory for the newspaper headlines. “He was killed in a raid, never went to trial.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Dr. Sheridan was working as a profiler at the time, trying to find him. She had an unfortunate encounter with Mr. Dalton.”

  Li blinked. His thoughts traced back to the scar he’d glimpsed on Tara’s shoulder.

  “Dr. Sheridan managed to escape,” Corvus continued. “However, it had been a harrowing experience. She resigned immediately and we expect she’s sustained permanent psychological damage from her contact with Mr. Dalton.”

  Li’s eyes widened.

  “As a result, I would advise you to keep Dr. Sheridan out of the way as much as possible. We may be required to humor her presence on this case, but I would prefer she not place herself—or anyone else—in harm’s way again. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal, sir.”

  “Good. Have your report on my desk in the morning.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good night, Agent Li.”

  Harry watched Corvus walk away across the parking lot, turn left on the sidewalk, and disappear.

  What Corvus had told him explained a great deal. And yet, he knew Corvus never offered information without motive. Underneath that brittle façade, Corvus clearly sought to keep Tara out of the investigation. . . and perhaps by extension, this would mean Harry’s own work would be limited.

  Harry couldn’t imagine what it would have been like, even in Corvus’s stripped-down description, to be the prisoner of the Gardener. Harry remembered the articles, the file photos of the blood-soaked boxes Amos Dalton had built. The claustrophobia she’d confessed to today seemed such a minor side effect.

  His eyes drifted up to the second floor of the motel, where Tara’s room light had gone out. He admired her for being able to go to sleep in the dark, years after.

  EVEN WITH THE LIGHTS OUT, IT WAS TOO BRIGHT TO SLEEP. Too accustomed to the total pitch black of night at the cabin, Tara found the light from the parking lot leaking around the cheap drapes to be too distracting. When she closed her eyes, the swish of traffic on the highway and the buzz of the parking lot lights kept her awake. In a nearby room, someone was watching television with the volume cranked up just loud enough to hear the laugh track, but not loud enough to make out the dialogue. Someone on the floor above her was taking a shower after a noisy bout of lovemaking, and the water sluiced down the pipes in metallic rattles.

  She stared at the ceiling, sweat glistening on her brow. Her head thumped under the force of the pulse in her temples. When she moved to sit up, her stomach lurched, and her hand pressed against the pillow, soaked with sweat.

  Tara stumbled out of bed to the bathroom, fumbled with the light switch. Blinding fluorescent light washed over her vision, and she sank to the floor. Vomiting into the toilet, she distantly wondered if the motel’s other occupants could hear her as clearly as she’d heard them.

  She leaned back, face pressed against the mercifully cool tile of the wall that smelled like Pine-Sol. She tried to steady her breathing, pulling her hair away from her scaldingly hot face. The nausea attacked her again, until she hit dry heaves and crawled to the bathtub. She opened the cold water faucet over her head and let the water course down over the back of her neck. She lifted her head. With shaking hands, she scooped water from the flow and splashed it on her face.

  Radiation poisoning. She knew the sym
ptoms usually presented themselves within the first twelve hours. There wasn’t any way of knowing how bad it was. . . but given that the symptoms had taken several hours to emerge, and she wasn’t showing any sign of burns, she hoped this would be a mild case.

  Unsteadily, she climbed to her feet. In the glare of the mirror, her pale face shone like the moon, dark circles like bruises under her eyes. Clutching the edge of the countertop, she considered her options.

  She thought, briefly, about calling Harry. Tara shook her head. No. He would do the right thing: take her to the emergency room, bring her things, and then leave. She would not give him a reason to exclude her from the case. There was little to be done for a case of radiation poisoning. The only good a trip to the ER would do for her would be prescription antiemetics and anesthetics. . . and being trapped under observation would not help Lowell Magnusson. She could feel, in her bones, that the case was too important to abandon. She was resolved to finish it.

  She found the last fragments of ice in the ice bucket in the bedroom, popped an ice chip in her mouth. The chill spread from her tongue to the rest of her body. She dragged the ugly comforter off the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and sank to the bathroom floor.

  Tara fell asleep in the brilliant glare of the bathroom light, the sounds of the television from upstairs echoing against the tile.

  Instead of bright light, cool tile, and the smell of Pine-Sol, Tara dreamed of darkness, of the chill of dirt at her back. She could feel her breath condensing hot against her face, the thinness of the air in her lungs, and the weight of earth creaking over her. She tasted warm, coppery blood, felt it slick on her fingers as she tried to move. Fertilizer stung the wounds lacing her body and her fingertips, where she’d torn her nails off clawing into the dark. She could smell the harsh tang of the chemicals, taste them in the back of her throat. Her face was wet with tears and mud.

  Buried. The fear drained into her, paralyzed her. Her breath came fast and shallow, and she felt the dizziness from lack of oxygen setting in. She couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. All she could do was whimper in the back of her throat.

  Could this truly be her fate? Suffocating to death in the ground? Her cards had never predicted this. But she felt helpless against the terrible weight pressing against her, unable to distinguish up from down.

  A voice whispered in her ear, a woman’s voice. “Fight.”

  She forced her breath to slow. She was hallucinating from lack of oxygen. Not a good sign.

  “Fight.”

  The voice emanated from her right and behind her. . . Perhaps that was the way up. She struggled to turn over, feeling dirt trickling into her mouth. She spat it out. Tara dug her fingers into the earth, feeling her fingernails peel. Splinters of wood dug beneath them, and she cried out.

  “Fight.”

  She pushed against that terrible weight with the palms of her hands.

  “Fight.”

  She had no other choice but to push against the terrible darkness.

  Chapter Six

  HOW DID you sleep?”

  “All right.” Tara sipped her water from a paper cup, alternating swallows between Rolaids tablets. Li noticed dark circles shadowed her doe eyes, blue as a bottle of overturned ink. “You?”

  “As well as could be expected.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye for a reaction as he drove. “I got a late-night visit from Corvus.”

  She hesitated, mid-sip, and the thick fringe of her eyelashes fluttered. “What did he want?”

  “He warned me to wrap things up quickly. He also insinuated you weren’t reliable.”

  “I suppose Corvus would think that,” she said mildly, but he watched the muscle in her jaw tighten.

  “What is it with the two of you?” He was being bullish, direct. “Did you two have a thing going on, or something?”

  She blinked, looked at him in shock. “A thing? With Corvus?” Horror washed over her pretty features. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but there was something deeply attractive about her. She swished water around in her mouth, as if trying to wipe out a bad taste. “Gah. Absolutely not.”

  Harry relaxed his grip on the wheel, though he hadn’t realized he’d been tense. Now that it was blurted out in the open, it sounded absurd. He couldn’t picture cold-fish Corvus as being a love struck inamorata. Tara. . . He could picture Tara with her hair fanned over a pillow, drinking tea and reading the Sunday paper in bed with a lover. But not Corvus.

  “He’s quite interested in keeping you out of the way.”

  Tara wrapped her hands around the cup, and it was some time before she answered. “Look, he made a pass at me once, a long time ago. I turned him down. We were partners for a year after that, but it was more. . . competitive. At that time, Special Projects was a new division. He and I were both ambitious, and we clashed. Often. I eventually left Special Projects. He got what he wanted, and I. . .” She smiled, without warmth. “I got out.”

  Uncomfortable silence settled in the car. Harry didn’t want to force her to talk about why she left. “And why did you come back now?”

  Tara shrugged. “An old friend asked me to. She felt Magnusson’s disappearance was important.”

  The neighborhood they drove through, Magnusson’s neighborhood, was heavy with the silence of early morning. This was an older section of the north edge of town, made up of a mélange of houses from various eras, most of them mid-twentieth century. Newspapers lay at the edges of driveways; garbage cans at the curb were yet to be picked up. A few isolated lights had come on in the kitchens and bathrooms, windows fogging with shower steam. There was no evidence of young families with children, no toys in the sparse yards or cars decorated with teenagers’ decals or ornaments in rearview mirrors. Tall fences and strategic use of shrubbery and trees to block the views suggested this was a place where people pretty much left their neighbors alone.

  Harry pulled into a crushed-gravel driveway shaded with pine trees taking a broad curve away from the road. “You must have some powerful friends.”

  “They surprise me with their nosiness, every so often.”

  She wasn’t going to give him any more than that, and Harry let it drop. He parked the car behind a small bungalow screened from the street by overgrown pine and cherry trees. The cherry trees were just beginning to bud, bringing a suggestion of life into the colorless landscape. The small yard had been xeriscaped with gravel, boulders, and native sage plants. Brown skeletons of coneflower and columbine rattled near the porch, heavy with beams and pillars in need of painting. Mail peeked out of the black mailbox. Harry snatched the letters, leafing through them. Bills, a couple of journals, a lingerie catalog.

  Tara had climbed to the porch and peeked in the window. “Looks like someone’s been here before us. It’s been tossed.”

  Harry tried the door. Locked. But it was a simple knob lock, no dead bolt. He fished in his wallet for a credit card, slipped it between the tongue of the lock and the hole in the doorjamb, and jiggled it back and forth until he felt the card slide behind the tongue and pull it back. Drawing his gun, he pushed the door open. Tara mirrored him on the other side of the door. Harry hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.

  He pushed the door open into the house. “Hello?”

  No answer. A potted plant lay broken in pieces just inside the door, splaying its striped spidery tentacles all over the terra-cotta, as if it were trying to gather itself together. A sign of a struggle. He smelled urine. This was not going to be good.

  He heard a sudden burst of motion—a thundering gallop, the rattle of chain—and he braced his stance to draw down on a shadowy assailant barreling down the hallway toward him. Like the Grim Reaper itself, it lunged in a blur of jingling darkness. Harry was knocked to the wooden board with an echoing slam, pulling his gun away and over his head. . .

  . . . as a chocolate Labrador retriever bounded out of the house as if its ass were on fire, charged into the yard, and squatted on the gravel
to take a leak.

  “Poor thing.” Tara’s voice washed soothingly over Harry, until he realized it wasn’t him she was clucking over. He rolled over to see her scratching the ears of the dog in the yard, who seemed to be holding five gallons of streaming water in its bladder. “You really had to go, didn’t you? When was the last time you were let out?” The dog whimpered back at her, finished its business, and slobbered on her cheek.

  “You okay, Harry?” she called over her shoulder at him, an afterthought.

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled as he climbed to his feet, swallowing the surge of adrenaline that had nearly caused him to shoot the animal. “Who’s the guard dog?”

  Tara read the brass tags on its collar. “This is Maggie.”

  “Maggie evidently had to pee.”

  Maggie bounded up the porch steps and jumped on Harry. In spite of himself, Li rubbed her ears, and she made awful faces of enjoyment, tongue lolling. He let the dog lead them into the house, tail low and wagging, nails clicking on the hardwood floors. She looked sheepishly at them when she walked past the broken potted plant, and tucked her tail between her legs when they passed the puddle on the floor of the kitchen. Chastised, she rolled her baleful brown eyes up at Harry and Tara.

  “It’s okay,” Tara murmured at the dog. Maggie leaned against her, forcing her head under Tara’s hand. She patted the dog’s sides. This dog hadn’t missed many meals, a nice layer of fat encasing her ribs.

  Advancing down the hall, Li did a quick check of the rooms. Nothing else seemed out of place. The living room held a tattered sofa, a CD collection, and an HDTV that made him salivate with envy. The coffee table was stacked with newspapers dated two days ago. The floor was strewn with dog toys, most of them pretty well destroyed. Li’s shoe brushed the remains of what might once have been a stuffed turtle, now wet with dog spit and leaking stuffing. When he stepped on it, it emitted a halfhearted squeak.

  The bathroom smelled vaguely of bachelor mildew, with a lonely toothbrush perched in a chrome holder. Magnusson’s bedroom was what Li would have expected: unmade bed, physics books stacked on the unmatched side tables. He peered under the bed and spied a stack of magazines he didn’t want to touch. He would have expected a man like Magnusson would’ve been more tech-savvy with his porn. Most people got theirs from the internet; Magnusson was apparently old-school and liked paper princesses.